This game is a massive missed opportunity, a bit like the movie itself.
The graphics in this game almost put me off before the game even left the prologue. Clearly the game was designed with night-time in mind, in that daylight really challenges the framerate of the game. Walking around become almost nauseating and very janky. If it wasn't for the fact that the game quickly turns toThis game is a massive missed opportunity, a bit like the movie itself.
The graphics in this game almost put me off before the game even left the prologue. Clearly the game was designed with night-time in mind, in that daylight really challenges the framerate of the game. Walking around become almost nauseating and very janky. If it wasn't for the fact that the game quickly turns to night-time and gets much smoother then I would have given up. The graphics themselves aren't anything to write home about. You're in a forest that's as stereotypical as can be and very bland. For some reason they allow you to customise your dog at the beginning but this is almost pointless since few variations are provided and mean little in the ensuing darkness anyway.
The gameplay is where the magic of the Blair Witch is like the Wizard of Oz being revealed as an average man behind a mysterious curtain - this game is painfully average, if not sub-par. Walking around the forest is supposed to create suspense and mystery. It actually achieves this, however this wears thin incredibly fast and changes to frustration as I literally just wandered around until serendipitously stumbling onto a clue which the dog led me on a meandering path to. This is not suspenseful - it is merely irritating and gets in the way of progress.
Speaking of which, this also sums up the dog - a nice gimmick but ultimately just a nuisance. He doesn't quite reach The Last Guardian levels of uselessness, but he is a middle-man (dog?) delaying my progress towards completing the next objective. I can see why he was included, but anyone testing the game should have detected the potential for irritation, or maybe I'm just impatient.
My final gripe with the gameplay are the video clues. How are we expected to know to pause a video at just the right split-second to achieve an arbitrary action? I had to look this up online and that always leaves me in a quandary between my own ignorance or bad game design. If anything this just detracts from the survival horror aspect of exploring the environment.
The story of Blair Witch is fairly straight-forward with a search for a missing child. This soon devolves into supernatural elements which I presume are elaborated upon further into the game (or not, if the movie is anything to go by), however I did not make it far enough to find out. There are seemingly very random milestones, as I had managed to trek from the Prologue to Chapter 4 without being alerted to the intervening chapters.
From the truncated experience I had it appeared that there was some sort of mental illness component to the story, either psychosis or PTSD. Some may find this inclusion enlightening whilst I tend to find it glamorising and condescending. Psychosis has enough associations with violence so if the game is trying to combat stigma then they aren't doing a great job.
Overall, the game has fantastic potential and progressing from daytime to night in the forest really did feel significantly different with suspense and ambience, but this was quickly marred by the inane meandering and unnecessary puzzles. The dog is a nice gimmick but his barking became grating very quickly. This is not a game I can comfortably recommend to any but the most lascivious interests in survival horror.… Expand
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